


Not Today

by faerywhimsy (persephone20)



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Gay Chicken, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-12
Updated: 2011-08-16
Packaged: 2017-10-22 13:22:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/238469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/persephone20/pseuds/faerywhimsy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little crack fic that was inspired by coquilleon. Fall out to a game of gay chicken which has Erik coming to terms on a truth about himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hank, Alex and the others are asleep. Drool hangs from the side of Alex's mouth. Erik isn't anywhere near sleep, and Charles' retired to one of the desks in the corner of the room to sort out a problem that has clearly popped up in his mind. It is there that Erik approaches him, only just managing to keep his voice to a restrained volume. His aloofness, however, is right out.

"So... are we gonig to talk about it?"

"Talk about what?" Charles turns, and his eyes are blue and innocent, or innocent is what Charles would like another person to believe. Erik knows Charles too well for that and, the longer the stare stretches out between them, the more that innocence just looks like amusement. At Erik's expense.

"Look, that wasn't me back there." He points to a non-specific place behind him, which is meant to indicate back in time, not back in that physical location. However, the attempt at explanation just makes Charles' eyebrows rise up towards his hairline.

"Oh?" he asks mildly. "And who was it then?"

Erik opens his mouth to reply, then emits a little growl. Yup, that innocence is no longer there; just amusement now. Erik feels the tension ride up his back, all the way up into his neck. He is standing even more stiff than he's held himself since the kiss, and Charles -- his best friend -- isn't helping.

"Don't test me, Charles," Erik warns and, just like that, Charles' expression changes. Softens. Charles is always the first of them to soften. Just like his lips when they moved under his own...

"Erik..." Charles stands up from his chair and moves to touch Erik on the shoulder. It is a familiar enough action; they'd done it dozens of times but, this time, Erik jolts away. Charles frowns. "Don't think I would ever hurt you..."

Erik just tightens his jaw and shoots Charles a look that gives him his answer.

Charles, being Charles, even now tries to make light of it. "You can't think anyone took that seriously!"

"Felt pretty serious to me."

Erik becomes more and more closed as each clipped sentence shoots from his mouth. Charles can't speak his way around it, can't touch his way out of it. Maybe he could coax him.

 _Erik..._

Again, Erik jolts, though this is not the first time they've talked this way. Charles pauses, watches Erik's eyes skate around to the rest of the men who are now sleeping, all thoughts of the gay chicken of earlier this evening forgotten. This way of communication is safe, even if one of those men turn out to be still awake.

Charles sees Erik come to that decision before daring to speak to him this way again.

 _What felt pretty serious?_

This way of communicating is also safer because Erik doesn't have to supply words. Charles' mutant power does that for him.

As the thoughts, feelings and images jumble together and unjumble in Charles' mind, the shorter man stops short. He can hardly believe the things he finds in his best friend's mind.

Moments of them walking together, having their chats, making fun of the other guys. Times when they watched the sun set as a backdrop of their humans vs mutants discussions. Thoughts that Erik would turn all that away for just one more approving glance from his best friend, for just one kiss.

Erik's mind draws Charles back to the moment of their kiss, and to the feelings associated. Erik's face is stony, jaw firm, as Charles comes to realise how much that moment meant to his stoic best friend.

 _Erik... you never let on._

 _How could I?_

The words shot through, spiced with Erik's familiar tone of disappointment that Charles knew was a regular part of Erik's psyche. But this...

 _You think there's something wrong with you because you enjoyed our kiss?_

 _How could there not be?_

Charles couldn't help a moment of inappropriate amusement. _One day, you will learn to stop answering a question with a question. Until then... would it help if I told you... I enjoyed our kiss too._

Silence hollowed out Erik's mind for a moment as he absorbed Charles' words with shock. The stony expression moved to a momentary look of hope in Erik's eyes, before they became shuttered again.

 _No... don't..._ Again, Charles stepped forward, trying to offer the caress that had been turned down moments before. This time, it was not turned down.

The touch made the link between them stronger and Charles caught another stray thought and memory pass the surface of Erik's mind. His parents being stripped away from him. The ever present memory of metal gates that swung back in the wake of Erik's power, followed by the thought, _If you ever..._

 _I will never leave you,_ Charles replied. He didn't kiss Erik again, not right then. Their next kiss would happen when there wasn't a group of other men with gay chicken coming back to mind.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was going to be a stand-alone. Then I liked writing them so much that I had to write a little more. Sorry if this doesn't quite seem to follow on from the last bit, it's meant to, but my head's in a slightly different place for what I'm wanting to get out of the story now.

They were both big on privacy now, and the rest of the students respected it, especially now that there was a young woman in their midst. Raven, having been with them from the start, was more often treated as one of the boys. Especially since she could often adopt the facade of one.

"Did you see her?" Erik had caught Alex saying to Hank. "Brown hair, legs up to here..."

"Eyes up to she's going to kill you if she hears you saying any of that kind of stuff," Hank informed him stiffly, never turning away from the book he was reading.

"Nah." Alex shrugged it off carelessly.

Feeling far more mild himself, Erik proceeded the rest of the way to Charles' office. Only he was allowed to walk into that office uninvited, without knocking. It was a privilege that Erik highly valued. It meant more than the words Charles said that Erik was able to invade his sanctum like that. Their relationship was still not of a very physical nature. Erik couldn't bring himself to act in what he still saw as such a deviant way.

That didn't stop him from teasing Charles. "Legs up to here, or so I've heard," Erik said, after he closed the door to Charles' office again. Charles' looked up, seeing the hand gesture that Erik had picked up from Alex. Erik slumped into a chair in front of Charles' desk. "Should I be worried? You have been spending a lot of time with the young woman since she arrived at the manor."

"My affections for you are still where they've always been," Charles said, setting aside the work he'd been doing. The corners of his eyes crinkled in a soft smile that was reserved for Erik. Erik wasn't so uncomfortable about that smile as he'd once been. "But you're not worried about that, otherwise you wouldn't have entered my office in such a way."

"It's true," Erik replied. "But, you must admit, it serves as a good opening line."

Charles didn't get a chance to reply to the line for there was a knock on his door. Erik immediately sat up straighter. It would never do to allow the others here to see beneath his aloof, almost mysterious, exterior. Only Charles was allowed that.

"Yes, come in," Charles called, his eyes twinkling in observation of Erik's deference.

A diminutive young teen opened the door and peered around it.

"If you're busy, Professor, I can come back later," she said, her eyes skating towards Erik. His eyes met hers curiously, but there was nothing more in it than that.

"No, no, Lorna. Anything you have to say can be said in front of Erik. Haven't the two of you met yet? Erik Lensherr, this is Lorna Dane."

"Charmed, I'm sure," Erik replied, stepping up from his chair to shake her hand.

Lorna gave him a shy smile. "Thank you. Professor, I was just wondering.. I was looking for something I might read, you know, between our classes. Something that might make me understand myself better."

A broad smile moved over Charles' face. So much of his work was about the possibility of the mutant gene in general but Lorna, just like Charles, was a telepath. He had no small amount of private work on that particular phenomenon.

"I think I might have something for you," he said, still smiling.

Lorna waited patiently while Charles ferreted out the piece of writing that was still in draft form, but printed out the manuscript standards.

"I hope this won't be too difficult to read," he said, pausing in awareness that he was giving something of a university grade to a high school student.

"Oh no, I'm sure this will be fine," Lorna said, reaching out to take the manuscript before Charles could change his mind. It was with a quick, "Thank you!" that she left the office again.

"I do believe I'm jealous," Erik said, once Lorna was gone.

Charles' eyebrows raised.

"You don't smile like that when I ask you something," Erik told him.

"Ah. You don't ask to read my books," Charles replied.

"Neither did she. I notice you just fobbed them off on her," said Erik.

Charles' lips twisted, and he went back to a show of going over his work. "Was there a reason you came to visit, Erik?" he said, all too innocently.

"You know very well there is," Erik growled. The time he spent with Charles was precious.

"Because, you know, if there's any reason to be jealous in here," Charles started cheekily, still looking down at his notes, "surely it's got to be me. You've been spending rather a bit of time with Raven of late. Any particular reason for that?"

"She's lonely," Erik said, and this time he was not being cheeky, nor jovial. "She needs someone who can understand her, without trying to change her. I'm trying to give her that."

"I've given her that," Charles said, stung despite himself.

"Someone she hasn't known almost her entire life, Charles," Erik told him. "You're all but family now. She expects certain things in the way you react to her. Getting a non-judgmental reaction from someone else..." Erik shrugged.

Charles didn't need to probe further. He knew, from all of his conversations with Erik, how the other man craved to stand out with his powers in the world and declare that he was a mutant. "We shouldn't have to hide, Charles," was a familiar refrain in their conversations, even while Charles pushed for the slower, more patient road.

Sometimes, Charles worried that having someone like Raven around him, someone who constantly hid who she really was outside of these walls, made Erik's need to push all the more intense. He had to hope that he could be a calming influence on the other man. So far, but for their moments of heightened sexual tension that were anything but calm, Charles' influence seemed to offset whatever influence Raven would have on him.

"Don't take it so personally, Charles." It took Erik speaking again to make Charles aware that he'd been so deep in his thoughts that he'd missed Erik coming up to stand beside him. "Just think of it as we've both got our special students on our road to making the world a better place."

The only thing that Charles wished for as Erik said that was that his closest friend did not have such a look of irony in his eyes as he said that.


	3. Chapter 3

He watched the way that Lorna came to interact with the other students over the following weeks. Hank she was quite comfortable with, but Hank had that effect on people. Besides, it was difficult to be uncomfortable around a large creature with blue fur after the initial shock had worn off.

Raven was stand-offish from the start, but that wasn't surprising since there was another female mutant in the group, one who didn't have to mask her true appearance to be what the world conventionally judged as beautiful. Maybe things would have been different if Angel had stuck around for a while longer, but there it was.

It was Lorna's interactions with Alex Summers that Erik watched with most interest. The two of them eyed each other from the corners of their eyes. Lorna would act demure with him even as she came more out of her shell with every other student and teacher in the manor.

"It's ridiculous," Erik told Charles in one of their conversations with each other. "It's as if the two of them are in this game that everyone else can see, only they're the only ones pretending it doesn't exist!"

Charles eyed him with amusement. "You know that I manage to get less and less work done with each of these charming conversations you come in here to have."

Erik's eyes narrowed. "What do you mean?"

Charles looked about to say something, reconsidered, then considered again. "Simply put," he said. "If you shone the light with this much energy on your own love life, it might answer some of the questions you have about others."

Charles was eyeing him calmly, waiting to see what he would do, but Erik was suddenly a riot of feeling and indignation. His back stretched so that he was suddenly sitting very tall in his chair. His mouth worked for a while, before he simply stood up, and silently excused himself from the room.

He came back later in the day. This time, Charles was much more circumspect, leaving Erik to be the one to speak first. Which he did. At length.

"I understand that you're in everybody's heads all of the time," Erik said, tersely. He was glaring at Charles, and Charles didn't dare to go into his head right now, not just out of respect for his friend. "Being in peoples' heads all the time, you should understand that, for them, sexuality is not such a fluid thing."

"Erik, I understand..." Charles started, extending his arms in a placating gesture, which Erik totally ignored.

He was breathing heavily, looking anywhere but at Charles. "You are like a brother to me... but _more_ than a brother. But I can't..."

"I know..." Charles said, sorrowing that he had ever had the inclination to push Erik on this, regardless of his own open-minded nature.

Erik's gaze flickered up to Charles' then. Whatever he saw in that gaze was enough to take some of the tension out of Erik's shoulders.

"I still dream about that kiss..." he whispered, and it hurt Charles' heart to hear it, but he didn't say anything, inferring correctly that this was a time for Erik to get something more off his chest. "It was just a stupid kiss, the others were all doing it. The difference is... that Alex is flirting with Lorna now."

Erik maintained eye contact with Charles for a while longer. Charles understood what Erik was trying to say, and expressed that understanding with no more than a nod of the head. Only once Erik was sure that he had made himself clear did he stand again. The two men shared a look that was filled with no small amount of longing, before Erik nodded once more, and turned -much less stormily this time- towards the office door.

It was the closest Erik had come to admitting he might be gay. Only after he left did Charles sit back in his chair and reflect on how much of a big deal that was. For him, there had never been such a divide. For him, people were pretty, and you could fall into bed with them if they were willing. With that Erik had as good as admitted tonight, Charles began to understand a bit of the binary Erik struggled against. Before he packed up his studies for the night, he willed himself to being more understanding in future of what he had just found out.


End file.
